The best piece about internet and politics in today’s papers…

… is Gaby Hinliff’s for The Observer. Her piece gives a nice overview, looks in some detail at various areas and make some good judgements.

She writes:

All three mainstream parties are adopting similar techniques, but with very different aims. For the Tories, the main challenge is to persuade nervous floating voters. They want to employ social media to “normalise” the idea of voting Conservative and reduce any stigma by showing that people who seem like you back David Cameron.

For Labour, it’s all about motivating existing support: it uses social media to organise activists, build camaraderie, and bash the opposition. The Liberal Dems’ priority is being heard over the din of larger parties, but because online campaigning can be cheaper than old-fashioned billboard wars, it now also seeks to punch above its weight online.

All three are using new media to tackle lingering disgust at the expenses scandal, which encouraged voters to switch off from conventional electioneering. Politicians now seek to reach voters in novel ways, wherever they can be found. For 23 million Britons that’s on Facebook, with around half logging in on any given day.

Social media matters precisely because it is social, creating networks and building intimacy between strangers quickly – even if some of them are politicians. We trust Facebook friends, or other mothers on Mumsnet in a way we no longer trust authority figures: political messages acquired third-hand from them may carry more weight than those received firsthand from a politician.

The full piece is well worth a read though, like most such pieces in the national media, it does rather skirt over the significance of internet campaigning at the local level. So, for example, it’s not so much a matter of Gordon Brown having a few thousand friends or fans on Facebook, but of constituency candidates having a few thousand – which makes potentially for a significant proportion of their electorate.